Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hate that most buyers spend about 20 times more time learning about a $20,000 car before buying a car than they learn about houses before buying a house. Idiots.

Pray tell where can we learn more about houses? I took a realtor class, took a modern architecture class read real estate websites but I'm still pretty clueless and would like to better educate myself. I'm not a realtor, have no plans to enter the biz, just want to learn to be an informed buyer.

NP here but there's a lot of For Dummies books that I bet would be helpful to you. Home maintenance for Dummies is a good start to teach you about the components of your house.

Otherwise, invest the time going to open houses in the neighborhood in advance of when you want to purchase so you can see what's out there and get a good idea of features/upgrades, etc. and pricing.

Thanks for the perspective! I've learned some things already.

Before the cynics (eventually win and) completely derail the discussion about things in real estate that need fixing, I will let you know that I have the programming skills to affect change and I plan on putting them into use: .NET C#, Java, PHP. SQL Server and Oracle DB. And in case you think I'm a dinosaur here are some buzzwords/frameworks to show you I am current in my awareness: Backbone, Angular, Node, Ruby, Postrgres, blablabla

If you already wrote a blog about the things you hated about your experience, I'm happy to read it to gain more insight.

Anonymous wrote:I hate that most buyers spend about 20 times more time learning about a $20,000 car before buying a car than they learn about houses before buying a house. Idiots.

Pray tell where can we learn more about houses? I took a realtor class, took a modern architecture class read real estate websites but I'm still pretty clueless and would like to better educate myself. I'm not a realtor, have no plans to enter the biz, just want to learn to be an informed buyer.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You guys suck. Help this guy out! I personally am an agent and I love real estate-there is nothing about it I hate. The wild rides and competition inspire me to do my best for my clients. but I respect what you are doing.

Help him what? He just wants to start a website. So we all put our brains together for what... to solve problems for him to publish on his blog?

Exactly. Maybe he should come up with his own ideas for his blog instead of trying to crowdsource it. Lame.

Anonymous wrote:You guys suck. Help this guy out! I personally am an agent and I love real estate-there is nothing about it I hate. The wild rides and competition inspire me to do my best for my clients. but I respect what you are doing.

Help him what? He just wants to start a website. So we all put our brains together for what... to solve problems for him to publish on his blog?

I hate that most buyers spend about 20 times more time learning about a $20,000 car before buying a car than they learn about houses before buying a house. Idiots.

Anonymous wrote:You guys suck. Help this guy out! I personally am an agent and I love real estate-there is nothing about it I hate. The wild rides and competition inspire me to do my best for my clients. but I respect what you are doing.

You love keeping your house in museum like order - ready to show at the drop of the hat? Really?

We are house hunting in a different area (not DC) and were annoyed when our realtor could/would not tell us a reason for why our offer was rejected on a house. We bid full price but kept contingencies such as inspection, financing and lost out, so either the other offer came in above asking or waived contingencies (not common in this area according to my realtor). I guess I understand why she wouldn't tell us but I really wanted to know, since it would factor in to our future offer(s) (i.e., should we waive a certain contingency? Offer above asking? etc.). She would not give any feedback.

Also, she didn't guide us on determining a price to offer on either of the two houses we've submitted offers on. I guess I thought that part of her job was to advise and help us on stuff like this. Maybe she's just a bad realtor, but that's also annoying to me, that she's earning 3% on the biggest purchase of our lives and isn't doing much other than showing me the houses I found online.

You guys suck. Help this guy out! I personally am an agent and I love real estate-there is nothing about it I hate. The wild rides and competition inspire me to do my best for my clients. but I respect what you are doing.

The thing I hate most about real estate is...reading whiney real estate blogs.

I hated selling the most. Having to keep everything clean and "just so" - ready to be shown at a moment's notice - was a royal pain. We had 2 dogs, 2 kids so not easy. Would highly recommend staying at a relative's/friend's house or staying in an extended stay hotel or just going on a mini vacay every weekend - that way your house will be available for showing and you won't go crazy trying to keep it immaculate all the time.

I like looking at homes buy. I think that's the fun part.

I've been lurking on the forum a few months now so I know there will be snark and trolling, and I accept that.

I have solutions to some problems in my head but I don't want to jump to conclusions yet, so I thought I'd reach out to the smart and experienced DCUM crowd to get your input.

I'd like to hear about the things you hated about your experiences. I think we're smart enough to come up with ideas that can solve these problems even if you don't think it's fixable, so long as we put our heads together.

(Btw, I just registered today and it seems like I've taken over someone's account from 2013. I assume this is a bug in the registration system so I bet if you try to register for the DCUM admin's account it might just let you take over his account...)

I'm confused. If you want to sell your house - you have to accept that people are going to come to see it. And some of those people aren't serious buyers and some are going to cancel. How can you change that?

And of course looking for a new house is stressful - unless you are renting and have all the time in the world to look for the exact thing you want.

Oh poor puppy

I wish I had discovered DCUM sooner. It would have saved me so much time, money, and frustration in my sale and purchase.

When I sold, I hated that I got so many no-show/no-cancel appointment requests. When the people did come, I hated the feeling that there were strangers going through my house and I had no idea who they were and if there was even a chance for an offer or if they were just kicking tires.

When I bought, I hated the anxiety of not knowing what was out there and what might come. I knew exactly what I wanted and where I wanted to live, kind of like everyone here looking for a house in N. Arlington, but there was nothing I could really do short of knocking door-to-door.

I've started building a website to solve my own frustrations with real estate in hopes that people won't have to go through this same pain in the future. I don't want to miss other major problems I didn't experience, so I'm asking DCUM, "What you hate about the real estate process and what you would change?"




p.s. Thanks for posting "This page has gotten predictably annoying..." and suggesting "Be the change you want to see. Start some more interesting conversations if you don't like the those here currently...."